What makes Loki tick?
There’s a moment early in Season 2 of Loki where the master trickster played by Tom Hiddleston is called out by Brad Wolfe, a rogue Hunter from the Time Variance Authority. “You think you’re the hero, Loki, but you’re not. You’re the villain.” Loki does a double take. And so do we. Is Brad onto something?
One’s true nature and identity is a theme playing around the edges of this Marvel series, set in a timeless TVA that exists to stop multiple versions of people—Variants—from bringing chaos and destruction to the multiverse by effing around with the timeline.
Loki himself, we saw in Season One, has at least a dozen versions of himself mucking with the temporal structure, including Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), who’s decided she wants to live her non-TVA life in the American Midwest, hiding in a McDonald’s.
The Disney+ series is packed with whimsy and weirdness, and great supporting characters—like Wunmi Mosaku as Hunter B-15, Ke Huy Quan (you know: Short Round) as Ouroboros, a plugged-in techie who gives the show a bit of hyper Everything Everywhere All At Once energy, and Fil-Am Eugene Cordero playing a geeky TVA receptionist to perfection. Then there’s the easy comedic chemistry between Loki and his cohort Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson), trying to unravel the secrets behind the Time Variance Authority, before it all unravels.
At the end of time once sat He Who Remains (played by Jonathan Majors), a being who tried to put a stopper in the endless multiversing and ended up duplicating himself to infinity at the end of Season 1. (You know him from Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania as Kang the Conqueror.) Here, he surfaces as an earlier version: the exuberant but seemingly harmless inventor Victor Timely, working out a prototype for the Temporal Loom back in 1830s Chicago.
Amid the lore of Marvel stories created for Disney+, Loki has a special rhythm all its own. We may not know what the overall MCU Phase Five arc looks like yet, but Loki offers a temporal pause: an enjoyable, if sometimes convoluted ride that scores points through cleverness and easy charm.
Loki and Mobius track him down, but also hot on his trail are former TVA Judge Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Miss Minutes, an anthropomorphic AI clock. We’re not sure how they’ll put all the pieces together in a six-part series that takes its time building character patter, but then suddenly ratchets up and zips along towards its conclusion. (Time is elastic, after all.)
Those who prefer more character exploration, as was hinted at in Season 1 when Mobius was trying to figure out what makes Loki tick, will have to settle for a more breathless pace. The show is having too much fun to take itself too seriously. Yet strangely, those expecting more mirth and merriment from the Trickster God will find it in short supply: Loki, after all, is on a mission.
This season, the writers do lots of laughs inserting the word “time” into every nook and cranny (“My inventions are ahead of their time,” says Timely; “Not a good time,” says Mobius when Hunter B-15 calls him. “Take your time,” says Miss minutes. “What’s the rush?”). The headlong, surreal pace reminds one a little of Noah Hawley’s Legion, another Marvel offspring series about multiverses and time, though that one was decidedly more adult in tone and theme.
Instead, here we get charming nods to Disney’s early animation history, such as the cartoon Miss Minutes, who ends up in the travel bag of Renslayer as things converge at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. There, Loki uncorks another possible Disney in-joke. The Trickster God is aghast that his Asgard culture has been represented by a simple row of totem pole gods at the World’s Fair. “I mean, you can’t reduce an entire culture down to a simple diorama,” scoffs Loki. “Such poverty of imagination.” A sideways allusion to the Disney theme park attraction, It’s a Small World, perhaps? “And Thor isn’t that tall,” Loki adds tetchily.
Amid the lore of Marvel stories created for Disney+, Loki has a special rhythm all its own. We may not know what the overall MCU Phase Five arc looks like yet, but Loki offers a temporal pause: an enjoyable, if sometimes convoluted ride that scores points through cleverness and easy charm.
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Watch Loki Season 2 on Disney+.
